Retro Video Game Finds II

by Salvatore Pane

This was a huge find for me and proof why you should hit up your local trade in spots as much as possible. There’s an Exchange retail store very close to my house (just a stone’s throw away from my favorite bar, the Squirrel Cage), and I tracked down this gem after stopping in on a whim before happy hour. Splatterhouse is a Turbografx-16 classic. I don’t own a Turbografx, but I’ve been considering making the plunge for a long time. I had Bonk’s Adventure for Gameboy as a kid, and I’m dying to play through the Bonk trilogy as it was originally meant to be played: on the Turbografx. Buying Splatterhouse for $10 is incentive. Now if I see a TG-16 for $75 with no games as I did in Chicago, I’ll have a good reason to pick it up. Plus, these game carts are so weird. I just like looking at them.

I’ve been trying to bulk up my Saturn collection since stumbling onto the system at my local Goodwill last month, and I recently picked up Virtua Fighter 2 for $5 at Ninja Entertainment in Dormont. NE is a great location for retro stuff, and they also resurface discs which apparently is pretty rare for Pittsburgh. I got the cart on the right for $10 at the Exchange a few stores over from Ninja Entertainment. They didn’t know what it was and had it lumped in with the N64 memory cards. The Interact Memory Card is a notoriously buggy device that allows you to play import games on your Sega Saturn. The 2d import library of the Sega Saturn is legendary, so I was pretty stoked to find this, but so far I’ve been unable to get it to work. I tried cleaning the exposed microchip with window cleaner and q-tips, but I might have to scrub down the actual pins in the system. If that doesn’t work, I can still buy the more reliable Pro Action Replay 4 in 1 + which acts as an import device, memory card, and ram card. Some of the 2d fighters on Saturn are so intense they need additional ram. The card usually runs for $25 plus shipping on specialty websites.

I visited my girlfriend Theresa a few weeks ago out on the eastern side of PA, and I arrived a few hours before she got out of work. So I headed to nearby Bristol and picked up The Ren and Stimpy Show: Buckeroos! on NES for $7 and Virtua Cop on Saturn for $5. The video game store there was pretty stocked with options and they had a neat little arcade room where they were taking bids on an old Mr. Do’s Castle machine. But they knew what they had, and their prices reflected that. Great supply of Turbografx-16 games though.

This is some king shit. A few days after finding Virtua Cop, Theresa took me to this amazing retro game store in Glensdale, PA called Classic Game Junkie. Reader, I’ve been collecting retro games for eight years, and this is BY FAR the best retro game store I’ve ever been to. You walk in, and the level end music for Super Mario Bros. plays. They had everything. NES, SNES, Virtual Boy, Turbografx, Saturn, pong clones, import games. They had ROBs and Power Gloves and Vectrex systems. They had rare oddities I’ve never even seen in real life before like the Famicom Disk System and Panic Restaurant. And best of all, the owner makes reproduction Nintendo carts. He had a reproduction of Nintendo World Championship 1990, the rarest game of all typically selling for $10,000, for $40. He had a repo of the never-before-released prototype of California Raisins: The Great Escape! I pretty much flipped my shit and bought the Saturn gun (the Stunner) and 3D Controller for a combined $30. Then I dropped $6 on Attack of the Killer Tomatoes for NES (it’s pretty uncommon, and I’ve never seen it before) and $14 each for NiGHTS and Street Fighter Alpha. If you’re anywhere near the eastern side of Pennsylvania, you have to check this store out.